Pope blesses Poles martyred by the Nazis

More than 100 Polish Roman Catholics killed by the Nazis during the second world war were beatified by the Pope yesterday during a three-hour mass in Warsaw.

Addressing 600,000 people in Pilsudski Square, John Paul II said the martyrs' deaths had been "painful signs of the action of evil", as well as proof that "in the end evil will not prevail over the fate of man and the world".

He told fellow Poles: "Today we commemorate the victory of those who in our century have laid down their lives for Christ. This victory has a special character, since it was shared by clergy and laity, young people and old, people from different classes and states."

The 79-year-old pontiff is due to end his longest return visit to Poland in the southern city of Cracow on Thursday.

On Friday, in a speech to parliament, his first to a national legislature, he urged Poles to keep alive the ideals of the former Solidarity movement by helping to create a "great European community of the spirit".

The 108 Polish martyrs who died at the hands of the Nazis during their occupation of Poland's between 1939 and 1945 include 15 victims of the Auschwitz concentration camp and 43 from Dachau, the death camp outside Munich, where 1,773 Polish priests were killed.

A church official, Father Tomasz Kaczmarek, said that the beatifications, the final step before full sainthood, followed seven years of investigations, and that the process had been much quicker than usual because of the Pope's personal backing.

He added that 80 other candidates for beatification had been dropped for want of evidence, despite 92,000 pages of documentation gathered by more than 600 archivists and historians.

Fr Kaczmarek said he believed the Pope had personally known one of the martyrs, Jozef Kowalski, who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942 for refusing to trample on his rosary.

In his sermon the Pope said he had asked God during a historic mass in the same Warsaw square in 1979, a year before the Solidarity strikes began, to give "hope and power" to fellow Poles.

Subsequent political, social and economic changes could be seen as God's response, he said.

"The church is constantly regenerated by the seed of the blood martyrs and draws life from the memory of their victory on earth."

John Paul, his head bandaged from a cut received in a fall the previous day, looked and sounded tired, but his words received repeated applause from the attentive crowd - the largest since the start of his pilgrimage nine days ago.

The mass was attended by President Aleksander Kwasniewski and other state and government leaders.

"The vitality of peoples who have emerged from the catacombs is a magnificent witness to the power of God's grace which enables weak men to become capable of heroism."

The mass beatification is the third in Polish history, and more than doubles, to 204, the number of Poles so honoured. The country has also produced 16 saints.

The beatifications are thought likely to encourage calls for recognition of communist-era martyrs in eastern Europe, around 45 of whom are official beatification candidates and are to be included in a list of 3,220 "martyrs of the 20th century" compiled by the Vatican for 2000. Bravery behind beatification

Father Franciszek Drzewiecki

He joined the Orionist order and was ordained a priest in 1936. He was at his first parish in Wroclaw when the German army invaded in September 1939. He went to help Polish soldiers in the forest, hearing their confessions.

He was arrested in November and deported to Sachsenhausen and Dachau. Fellow prisoners remembered him as someone who "worked hard on his kindness and consideration".

Worn down by two years of hard labour, he was sent, aged 34, to Hartheim Castle, near Linz, where he was gassed in September 1942.

Kazimiera Wolowska and Bogumila Noiszewska

During the Soviet occupation of Slonim (now Belarus) in 1939, Wolowska, 63, and Noiszewska, 56, two Immaculate Conception nuns, secretly provided food and schooling for homeless and orphaned children, including Jews, at their convent.

When Slonim was captured by the Germans in 1941, the women refused to go into hiding, despite being tipped off that the Gestapo was about to arrest them.

They were shot by firing squad a day later. Witnesses said they had been badly beaten and made to stand naked in the execution trench.